Turing Tree Releases Monthly Top 50 AI Researchers by Citations

Summary

Turing Tree's Top 50 is a monthly ranking of artificial-intelligence researchers based on citation counts from Google Scholar. The October 1 edition compares each researcher's total with the September 1 figure, reports the numerical gain and growth rate, and excludes researchers who do not have a public Google Scholar profile. Yoshua Bengio ranks first with 1,164,407 citations, followed by Geoffrey Hinton with 1,092,086 and Kaiming He with 879,889. Ilya Sutskever, Jian Sun, Ross Girshick, Andrew Zisserman, Shaoqing Ren, Yann LeCun, and Quoc V. Le complete the top 10. The list spans machine learning and deep learning as well as computer vision, natural-language processing, robotics, reinforcement learning, statistics, neuroscience, autonomous driving, and related areas. Several researchers recorded relatively high monthly growth: Alec Radford rose 2.5%, Jitendra Malik 2.8%, Demis Hassabis 2.3%, and Sergey Levine 2.8%, while many others grew between roughly 0.8% and 2.1%. The ranking also shows movement in the lower positions, including Piotr Dollár entering at number 20 and several researchers moving up or down by one place. The page presents affiliations alongside fields, showing researchers connected with universities, research institutes, and companies including Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, and others. Turing Tree cautions that citation counts are only one way to measure research impact and should not be treated as a complete assessment of a researcher's capabilities or influence. The page says the ranking is updated monthly and offers newsletter updates.